Die Hard ('88) vs. Lethal Weapon ('87) - (Episode 1 of 3)

<v Speaker 1>All the leather outside.
<v Speaker 2>All right, everybody, welcome back to the Surely You Can't
<v Speaker 2>Be Serious Podcast?
<v Speaker 3>Jason?
<v Speaker 2>How you doing? I'm doing great? How you doing tonight?
<v Speaker 2>I'm doing fantastic. I've got my Seagrum's golden wine cooler.
<v Speaker 3>Over here, and I'm practicing some martial arts. I guess
<v Speaker 3>we're gonna have to register you as a lethal weapon.
<v Speaker 2>Jason. I cannot believe it. We have reached the final
<v Speaker 2>comparison of season one. We have done our first season,
<v Speaker 2>and I'm so excited and so happy. It's been amazing, man.
<v Speaker 2>I had a fantastic year. It's been great. It has
<v Speaker 2>been so fun to do this with you. And I
<v Speaker 2>can't wait to tackle season two coming up in in
<v Speaker 2>the year with two of our favorite movies of all times,
<v Speaker 2>right at Christmas time where they need to be. I
<v Speaker 2>can't wait to get into these two movies.
<v Speaker 3>Man, these are two of my all time favorite movies.
<v Speaker 2>What a great way to end the season.
<v Speaker 3>I know, Man, I literally have lost sleep thinking about
<v Speaker 3>these episodes, Like I lay in my bed going, I
<v Speaker 3>can't wait to talk about these two movies.
<v Speaker 2>I've lost sleep because I feel like I'm not going
<v Speaker 2>to do justice to these movies because they're so good.
<v Speaker 2>I know, right.
<v Speaker 3>Hey, before we get too far in the podcast, I
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<v Speaker 2>This is what he said.
<v Speaker 3>The title says, my new favorite podcast. This is such
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<v Speaker 2>Got to give a special shout out to the Beckett Foundation.
<v Speaker 2>They on Twitter referenced something I said back in April.
<v Speaker 2>Back April twenty first, and we were doing Coming to
<v Speaker 2>America versus Trading Places. I said something about Ralph Bellamy
<v Speaker 2>versus Bill Bellamy and that they were not related and
<v Speaker 2>post a picture and my gosh, these guys, what is
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<v Speaker 2>on Twitter. That was really cool. I had to refresh
<v Speaker 2>my memory. I was like, I don't remember what we
<v Speaker 2>were talking about. Why did they send us a picture
<v Speaker 2>of Bill Bellamy? That's a strain.
<v Speaker 3>Well, like you said, this is the end of season
<v Speaker 3>one one. We will be taking a break after the
<v Speaker 3>completion of the die Hard Versus Lethal Weapon comparison, and
<v Speaker 3>we will be back in February. Hopefully that'll give us
<v Speaker 3>a chance to get ahead, do some studying and see
<v Speaker 3>our families.
<v Speaker 2>Yes, yes, the good news is that right as we're
<v Speaker 2>coming to our pause, the Soundtrack Show is starting to
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<v Speaker 3>Also, check out our friends at the thirty something Movie Podcast.
<v Speaker 3>They're getting ready to start nineteen ninety one.
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<v Speaker 2>enough of the pledge drive campaigning that we're doing here.
<v Speaker 2>Time to jump into these movies. Jason, are you ready?
<v Speaker 2>Do you really want to jump?
<v Speaker 3>Well?
<v Speaker 2>Do you Well, that's just fine with me. Let's do it, man,
<v Speaker 2>Let's do it. Okay. I gotta say this. In this
<v Speaker 2>entire year, it's been amazing to learn about the different
<v Speaker 2>people involved in all of our favorite music and movies.
<v Speaker 2>The guy that I didn't know that I am excited
<v Speaker 2>to have learned about is Shane Black. He was a
<v Speaker 2>guy who was just a name up until we started
<v Speaker 2>doing our research for this. But what an interesting guy
<v Speaker 2>he is. You know, he's like your friend, that is
<v Speaker 2>this just this always angry, hating on life guy, but
<v Speaker 2>he is so intelligent and so funny that you still
<v Speaker 2>love him. And that's to me, that's Shane Black. You know.
<v Speaker 3>It's interesting that you say that I didn't know a
<v Speaker 3>whole lot about him before that. Of course, familiar with
<v Speaker 3>some of his movies, and we talked about him very
<v Speaker 3>very briefly back in our Bill and Ted episode, Chris
<v Speaker 3>Mavison and Ed Solomon were in class with Shane Black
<v Speaker 3>at UCLA, and they would talk about how they would
<v Speaker 3>work and work struggle to come up with these ideas.
<v Speaker 3>And this guy barely came to class, didn't say two
<v Speaker 3>words in class, but when he turned in a writing
<v Speaker 3>assignment was the best thing that anybody in the class
<v Speaker 3>I've ever seen.
<v Speaker 2>So he actually shared a house with Ed Solomon. They
<v Speaker 2>weren't just in class together. They shared a house him,
<v Speaker 2>Ed Solomon, and Fred Decker, who's the guy who wrote
<v Speaker 2>Monster Squad, A Knight of the Creeps, and RoboCop three.
<v Speaker 2>They all shared a house together, which they called the Pad,
<v Speaker 2>Oh guys, and they considered it a fraternity for the
<v Speaker 2>movie Buffs of Ucla, and they would go out and
<v Speaker 2>recreate John wu fight scenes in their front yard at
<v Speaker 2>three o'clock in the morning. That sounds exactly like what
<v Speaker 2>my house was like when I was in college. I
<v Speaker 2>was a theater major, so I had a house full
<v Speaker 2>of actors and this is the kind of crap that
<v Speaker 2>we would do. We just did not become internationally famous afterwards. Tragic. Okay,
<v Speaker 2>So Shane Black starts off in childhood as a reader.
<v Speaker 2>He is a book lover and he likes the Hardy Boys,
<v Speaker 2>but he also likes the Mickey Spallaine grown up books,
<v Speaker 2>and so he becomes this big mystery thriller reader. And
<v Speaker 2>when he gets into UCLA, he becomes interested in writing
<v Speaker 2>and starts developing this screenplay. And he's got an older
<v Speaker 2>brother named Terry Black, who at the time was not
<v Speaker 2>a screenwriter, but at the time with somebody that Shane
<v Speaker 2>Black adored, and Shane Black was working on this screenplay
<v Speaker 2>that he was really excited about. And he actually took
<v Speaker 2>a break from college to finish up this scene and
<v Speaker 2>the screenplay that he was and he showed it to
<v Speaker 2>his brother to see what he thought of it, and
<v Speaker 2>his brother said, I don't like it. It was this
<v Speaker 2>kind of weird mix of like a platoon of army
<v Speaker 2>guys in Vietnam and some sort of supernatural stuff going on.
<v Speaker 2>And so Shane is devastated. And he's sitting there in
<v Speaker 2>front of his typewriter contemplating whether he should bother to
<v Speaker 2>go on writing anything ever again, and the page is
<v Speaker 2>just staring at him, and he's staring back at the
<v Speaker 2>page and he decides to write a sentence, and that
<v Speaker 2>sentence gets followed by another sentence, and then the words
<v Speaker 2>just kind of start flowing out of him, and he
<v Speaker 2>writes an entirely different scene, which becomes an entirely different script,
<v Speaker 2>which ultimately he shows to somebody who gets him an
<v Speaker 2>agent who then finds a way to get another script
<v Speaker 2>that he's written sold. And that script that he wrote
<v Speaker 2>at twenty one, which he sells at twenty two is
<v Speaker 2>the script for Lethal Weapon. It's fantastic. That moment in
<v Speaker 2>front of the typewriter was a moment of precarious history
<v Speaker 2>because he said, had I not typed that sentence, had
<v Speaker 2>I not typed that sentence, I would have given up
<v Speaker 2>writing forever. But something just was staring back at me
<v Speaker 2>that said, just type something. It is because of that
<v Speaker 2>that we have Lethal Weapon, and that we have Iron
<v Speaker 2>Man three, and that we have the nice guys. I mean,
<v Speaker 2>pretty huge deal. And the name of that script that
<v Speaker 2>he showed his brother that he changed the Shadow Company. Yay,
<v Speaker 2>all right, right, so those are the bad guys from
<v Speaker 2>Lethal Weapon exactly if you haven't if you haven't seen
<v Speaker 2>Lethal Weapon in a while, that is the company that
<v Speaker 2>all of the bad guys got together in in Lethal Weapon. Nice.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, you know one of the things when we were
<v Speaker 3>talking about prepping for this. So I know Shane Black
<v Speaker 3>as the writer Leth the Weapon. He wrote Kiss Kiss,
<v Speaker 3>Bang Bang, he wrote Long Kisk and Night, he wrote
<v Speaker 3>Ironman three. But he's also he acts in Predator. He's
<v Speaker 3>the guy with glasses. He's like the one guy that's
<v Speaker 3>not totally musclebound. That's Shane Black.
<v Speaker 2>Yes, he's the first guy to die. He sold Leith
<v Speaker 2>a weapon and so he's got two hundred and fifty thousand,
<v Speaker 2>which is pretty nice for a guy who's twenty two
<v Speaker 2>years old. Right. And so Joel Silver, the producer of
<v Speaker 2>Lethal Weapon and the producer of Diehard, both the movies
<v Speaker 2>we're talking about, he says, hey, Joel, can I be
<v Speaker 2>in this movie Predator? And Joel's like sure, we just
<v Speaker 2>we want you to come in and we want you
<v Speaker 2>to help out with the script writing on this deal.
<v Speaker 2>And he's like okay. So Shane Black goes and he
<v Speaker 2>is the he's the first soldier to die in Predator.
<v Speaker 2>He's Hawkins, that's his name. But you know who The
<v Speaker 2>director of Predator was John McTiernan, who then goes on
<v Speaker 2>to direct die Hard. Isn't amazing. So these movies, I mean,
<v Speaker 2>we just we jumped on the movies because they're the
<v Speaker 2>obvious comparison, right, They're both Christmas movies, yes, and abs are.
<v Speaker 2>And they are both urban cowboy movies, right they are.
<v Speaker 2>They're the urban gunslinger movies. Right, yep, for sure, one
<v Speaker 2>hundred percent. But they're related in so many other ways.
<v Speaker 2>You have the you've got the overlap of at least
<v Speaker 2>three actors in both of the movies. You've got the
<v Speaker 2>script writer of Letha Weapon is in a movie directed
<v Speaker 2>by the director of die Hard, and later on he
<v Speaker 2>becomes a writer for Last Action Hero, which is also
<v Speaker 2>directed by the director of die Hard. It's all just
<v Speaker 2>they're just intertwined so so tightly. I've never seen two
<v Speaker 2>movies that were more closely related than these two.
<v Speaker 3>When you look at the casting. And I know we'll
<v Speaker 3>get into casting here in a minute. But Ur Schwarzenegger
<v Speaker 3>starred in Predator, directed by John McTiernan. John mc tee,
<v Speaker 3>you're in. His next project is die Hard. He was
<v Speaker 3>going to hire Schwarzenegger. This was going to be a
<v Speaker 3>Commando sequel, yeah, right, And instead of his wife being
<v Speaker 3>in trouble. It was Alyssa Milano, his daughter. I mean
<v Speaker 3>these movies are from the same DNA.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, you were talking to me earlier and said these
<v Speaker 2>two movies could almost be in the same universe. And
<v Speaker 2>they really could. I mean they're both in la You
<v Speaker 2>could really see, you know, Sergeant al Powell walking in
<v Speaker 2>as Merton Riggs are walking out. Right. Oh, that would
<v Speaker 2>have been awesome. I would have loved that. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
<v Speaker 2>I think for whatever die Hard Leath the Weapon sequel
<v Speaker 2>that's coming up, if they did some sort of overlap
<v Speaker 2>like that, I might just lose my freaking mind.
<v Speaker 3>Al Powell tosses Rigs a Twinkie on the way by,
<v Speaker 3>you know.
<v Speaker 2>Right, Yeah, we'd have to figure out how Agent Johnson
<v Speaker 2>who died now I guess he died in both of them.
<v Speaker 2>He'd have to I know, they were twin brothers or something.
<v Speaker 3>Well, let's talk about that for just a second. So
<v Speaker 3>agent Johnson, no, the other one, he was in Diehard, right,
<v Speaker 3>Grandell Bush, and he was also a cop in Lethal Weapon.
<v Speaker 2>Then you have Al Leon, who.
<v Speaker 3>Was the guy who tortured Rigs with the battery cable. Yes,
<v Speaker 3>he was also ginghis Khanan.
<v Speaker 2>Written by Ed Solomon, who is the room made of
<v Speaker 2>Shane Black, as we've established.
<v Speaker 3>And he was also the terrorist who, if you'll remember,
<v Speaker 3>reached under and got a baby Ruth right before they
<v Speaker 3>shot the two x two formation coming in the building.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah.
<v Speaker 3>Also, yeah, you have Roberts Mex's ex.
<v Speaker 2>Wife, Mary Ellen Trainer.
<v Speaker 3>She plays the police psychologist who says Riggs is he's
<v Speaker 3>on the edge.
<v Speaker 2>You don't want to be around him when he goes.
<v Speaker 2>And he's also the TV reporter in Diehard yep.
<v Speaker 3>She's the one standing next to the news reporter who says,
<v Speaker 3>eat it, Harvey, right.
<v Speaker 2>And she's also the mom and Goonies, which is directed
<v Speaker 2>by Richard Donner, who's also the director of eth a Weapon,
<v Speaker 2>It's Amazing. And the police chief in Lethal Weapon is
<v Speaker 2>also the police officer in Superman One, which is also
<v Speaker 2>directed by Richard Donner.
<v Speaker 3>His name is Steve Kahan. He is the cousin a
<v Speaker 3>film writer, producer and director Richard Donner.
<v Speaker 2>There you Go. I watched some of the interviews with
<v Speaker 2>Richard Donner on Lethal Weapon back when it was first out.
<v Speaker 2>He was rocking the mullet just like Mel Gibson. Was.
<v Speaker 2>It was the like Mullet two point zero where it's
<v Speaker 2>all feathered. Oh yeah, like swooping. Who. Okay, so we've
<v Speaker 2>we've hit Joel Silver, who produced both movies. Hit Shane Black,
<v Speaker 2>who wrote Lethal Weapon. Then we've hit John McTiernan, who
<v Speaker 2>who is the director of die Hard. Now he had
<v Speaker 2>come off of Predator. As you said, he got that
<v Speaker 2>job because he had written and directed a movie called Nomads,
<v Speaker 2>which had Pierce Brosnan in it. This was Pierce Brosnan's
<v Speaker 2>first role. And you probably didn't see that movie. It
<v Speaker 2>wasn't really well regarded. But if you happen to watch it,
<v Speaker 2>there's a scene where a guy falls. You're it's got
<v Speaker 2>your point of view, and you're watching him fall off
<v Speaker 2>of a building as I was, And I'm like, what
<v Speaker 2>this is the same Oh well it's the same director.
<v Speaker 2>And I listened to him. He's like, yes, I stole
<v Speaker 2>it from myself. I think I didn't. You think I
<v Speaker 2>didn't know what I was doing there? Of course what
<v Speaker 2>I was doing. You've got Richard Donner directing Lethal Weapon,
<v Speaker 2>and then the guy that we haven't mentioned yet, but
<v Speaker 2>we have mentioned previously in some of our other episodes
<v Speaker 2>mister Steven desusa who wrote and really kind of rewrote Diehard.
<v Speaker 3>Yes, yes, you know, just to backtrack, just to touch
<v Speaker 3>Richard Donner.
<v Speaker 2>We have now.
<v Speaker 3>Covered Superman one, Superman two ish with Richard Donner, the
<v Speaker 3>Lost Boys, Lethal Weapon, and I promise you at some
<v Speaker 3>point we're going to cover the Goonies.
<v Speaker 2>No question. It will be one of the movies for
<v Speaker 2>season two, for sure.
<v Speaker 3>Richard Donner has his fingerprints all over the eighties.
<v Speaker 2>Stephen Desuso was not the original writer of Diehard. The
<v Speaker 2>original writer was a guy named Jeb Stewart. Now, Jeb
<v Speaker 2>Stewart had signed a contract with Disney. It was a
<v Speaker 2>four movie contract, and so he's obligated to write four
<v Speaker 2>movies for them, and basically they paid him so little
<v Speaker 2>that he was about to go broke. And so after
<v Speaker 2>he completed his first script for them, he had like
<v Speaker 2>this six week time period that he could write a
<v Speaker 2>movie for somebody else. And so what he did was
<v Speaker 2>to go and find a novel that he liked, and
<v Speaker 2>he decided to write that script.
<v Speaker 3>He wrote Nothing Last Forever by Roder Thorpe.
<v Speaker 2>Yes, which in that novel, John McLain is not named
<v Speaker 2>John McClain he has a different first name.
<v Speaker 3>The character in the book is called Joseph Leland. I
<v Speaker 3>don't know if we want to dive into yes, go
<v Speaker 3>for it, joe Leland. Okay, so you're absolutely right. So
<v Speaker 3>die Hard is the movie version of a book.
<v Speaker 2>Called Nothing Lasts Forever by Roder Thorpe.
<v Speaker 3>This is the sequel book to another book called The Detective.
<v Speaker 2>Now.
<v Speaker 3>The Detective was made into a movie in the late
<v Speaker 3>sixties starring Frank Sinatra. Frank Sinatra played Joe Leland and
<v Speaker 3>when they remade Nothing Last Forever as die Hard, contractually
<v Speaker 3>they had to offer the part to Frank Sinatra. Can
<v Speaker 3>you imagine a world where die Hard instead of Bruce Willis,
<v Speaker 3>we had a seventy three year old Frank Sinatra.
<v Speaker 2>Not a chance, and neither could Frank Sinatra. Hey kid
<v Speaker 2>me baby, give me another drink.
<v Speaker 3>Come on, I say, Yippi Kaya, Shooby dooby doo. Thankfully
<v Speaker 3>he had the good sense to say no, thanks, I no,
<v Speaker 3>I'm not doing that right.
<v Speaker 2>So Jeb Stewart takes this opportunity to write the movie
<v Speaker 2>die Hard, and really, Joel silver is just kind of
<v Speaker 2>rolling this point. Joel Silvers is a producer that has
<v Speaker 2>suddenly come out with Predator and lethal weapon. He's literally
<v Speaker 2>out promoting them. At the same time, the studio calls
<v Speaker 2>him because they say, hey, we've got this book and
<v Speaker 2>we've got this script that's okay, can you do something
<v Speaker 2>with it? And he's like, sure, let's put it together.
<v Speaker 2>So Jeb Stewart's script ultimately gets substantially rewritten by Steven Desuso. So,
<v Speaker 2>like you said, they had this plan that it would
<v Speaker 2>be Commando two, which was all well and good until
<v Speaker 2>Arnold Schwarzenegger said, no, thank you.
<v Speaker 3>Right, he wanted to take a shot at comedy, and
<v Speaker 3>so he went and did the movie Twins.
<v Speaker 2>Right. Have you seen Twins? Yeah? I like it, Okay,
<v Speaker 2>I have whatever.
<v Speaker 3>It doesn't blow my freaking doors off like Diehard does, though, no,
<v Speaker 3>of course not, because it's comedy.
<v Speaker 2>It's not an action. But he wanted he wanted to
<v Speaker 2>show his range, and that's fine. So you don't get
<v Speaker 2>Arnold Schwarzenegger. Obviously, the second choice has to be Sylvester
<v Speaker 2>Stallone and he says no, no thank you as well,
<v Speaker 2>and you're like, well, crap, who else do we have? Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>I mean we want to go. I've got the list
<v Speaker 2>of go, Go, Go go. Okay, so we've already talked.
<v Speaker 3>In its original incarnation, you had Frank Sinatra offered the part.
<v Speaker 2>At that time it.
<v Speaker 3>Was a father daughter relationship rather than a husband and wife,
<v Speaker 3>so they offered to Charles Bronson, Burt Reynolds.
<v Speaker 2>Richard Gear was Joel Silver's first choice. Yeah, he pushed hard,
<v Speaker 2>pushed hard on Richard Gear, and no, I don't really
<v Speaker 2>like it. I don't want to be running around with
<v Speaker 2>the gun and doing my own stunts. No, thanks, okay,
<v Speaker 2>so let's keep going.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, Richard Gear, Sylvester Stalone, as you said, Harrison Ford
<v Speaker 3>l Schwarzenegger, as we talked about Clint Eastwood.
<v Speaker 2>Had a shot at this too old.
<v Speaker 3>At that point, Robert de Niro was very close to Diehard.
<v Speaker 2>That had been a different movie altogether, that would have
<v Speaker 2>been Don Johnson. Yeah. Yeah, So Don Johnson at this
<v Speaker 2>point is very hot with Miami Vice, and then Bruce
<v Speaker 2>Willis is very hot with Moonlighting. Hang on, I'm not done.
<v Speaker 3>Oh sorry, so sorry, no, no, no, So speaking of
<v Speaker 3>hot on TV, you have Don Johnson, you have Richard
<v Speaker 3>Dean Anderson ring a Bell mcgiver.
<v Speaker 2>Oh yeah, okay, yeah, yeah, not gonna.
<v Speaker 3>Okay, And finally mel Gibson was offered this part. What yeah,
<v Speaker 3>what mel Gibson.
<v Speaker 2>Ah, that's amazing, that is amazing. All those guys it down,
<v Speaker 2>all those guys not interested. And so Bruce Willis, Bruce
<v Speaker 2>Willis again was a choice of Joel Silver like he
<v Speaker 2>had seen him in Blind Date, which was the Blake
<v Speaker 2>Edwards movie that had come out before, and obviously he
<v Speaker 2>had seen him in in Moonlighting, and so he didn't
<v Speaker 2>have big, a big box office pull at this point.
<v Speaker 2>But Joel Silver thought that he could make it happen.
<v Speaker 2>He thought that he could do it.
<v Speaker 3>Okay, we got to talk about this for a second.
<v Speaker 3>Were you a fan of Blind Date?
<v Speaker 2>Never seen it? Okay?
<v Speaker 3>I am an unapologetic fan of the movie Blind Date.
<v Speaker 3>I like Blake Edwards movies. They're freaking funny.
<v Speaker 2>Blake who did Pink Panther movies? If that helps anybody out.
<v Speaker 3>There, Yes, and the movie Skin Deep with John Ritter.
<v Speaker 3>I think they're so funny. And I think Bruce Willis
<v Speaker 3>is very charming, very funny in the movie Blind Date,
<v Speaker 3>and it kind of gets beat on a little bit.
<v Speaker 3>But I am a huge fan of Moonlighting.
<v Speaker 2>How about you? Absolutely watched every single episode. We loved it. Yeah, great,
<v Speaker 2>great TV show. So weirdly, this is kind of a
<v Speaker 2>weird thing that happens. I mean, they've gone through a
<v Speaker 2>whole bunch of people and are basically kind of left
<v Speaker 2>with Bruce Willis and Joel silver Is having to push
<v Speaker 2>to get him in the movie. But then they offer
<v Speaker 2>him five million dollars to play this part, which is insane.
<v Speaker 2>That's a crazy amount of money to offer even a
<v Speaker 2>star at this point. And he's a guy who has
<v Speaker 2>done one movie that's been released. It's actually two movies,
<v Speaker 2>but one that's been released at this point, and it
<v Speaker 2>only did kind of good. And so Robert Murdoch, the
<v Speaker 2>head of the studios, green lights it. He's like, yep,
<v Speaker 2>go ahead, give him five million dollars. And so the
<v Speaker 2>next day, Richard Dreyfus fired his agent. I heard this.
<v Speaker 2>What he's never done anything, and I've done all that,
<v Speaker 2>you can't get me five million dollars to fire. So
<v Speaker 2>the question is then at this point, hey, we've fired him,
<v Speaker 2>We've got him for five million dollars, but he's still
<v Speaker 2>in Moonlighting. I mean, that's a TV show that's constantly filming,
<v Speaker 2>but They've got this little miracle that happens. Simple Shepherd
<v Speaker 2>gets pregnant and they have to stop filming Moonlighting for
<v Speaker 2>six weeks, and so they have exactly six weeks to
<v Speaker 2>film die Hard with Bruce Willis. They don't film the
<v Speaker 2>whole movie in that six weeks. They just filmed the
<v Speaker 2>Bruce Willis parts in the first six weeks, and then
<v Speaker 2>they go on and film the other parts after that,
<v Speaker 2>which is kind of I mean, you know, we watch
<v Speaker 2>movies and we kind of, you know, we have this
<v Speaker 2>image that it's all filmed chronologically, which of course it's not.
<v Speaker 2>But it's just kind of interesting to think that so
<v Speaker 2>much of the conversation that occurs on the radio between
<v Speaker 2>Al and John and Hans and John didn't really ever
<v Speaker 2>really happen. It was just the magic of movies, movie magic.
<v Speaker 2>And so interestingly, the villain in die Hard this is
<v Speaker 2>his first major motion picture. Yep, mister Alan Rickman had
<v Speaker 2>never been in a motion picture before. He had done
<v Speaker 2>some British television. He had done quite a bit of
<v Speaker 2>stage work and that ultimately is how he got discovered.
<v Speaker 2>He was in Liaisons Dejeruse as the bad guy in
<v Speaker 2>that on a Broadway production and John McTiernan and Joel
<v Speaker 2>Silver happened to catch the play and they see him
<v Speaker 2>being the bad guy and they're like, there's our Hans Grueber.
<v Speaker 2>There is our villain right there, and they offer him
<v Speaker 2>the part. So, as we just discussed, the first scenes
<v Speaker 2>that they're shooting are the scenes with Bruce Willison, So
<v Speaker 2>that means the first scene that they film with Alan
<v Speaker 2>Rickman is the scene where he meets John McClain as
<v Speaker 2>Hans Gruber pretending to be Bill Clay Clay Billy, which
<v Speaker 2>is weird because Bill Clay, of course nothing like Hans Kruber.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, so there's an interesting story with this. So they're
<v Speaker 3>sitting around at lunch one day. Of course, Alan Rickman
<v Speaker 3>has a heavy English accent, but they're asking him, Hey, Alan,
<v Speaker 3>do you do an American accent?
<v Speaker 2>And he said, well, I don't.
<v Speaker 3>I don't really do an American accent, but I do
<v Speaker 3>do like a California accent. And he cracked everybody up
<v Speaker 3>and everybody was dying laughing, and they're like, man, we
<v Speaker 3>gotta do this. The characters have to meet, and to me,
<v Speaker 3>this blows my mind. Okay, so we have this really
<v Speaker 3>amazingly well constructed action movie, maybe the best action movie ever,
<v Speaker 3>and they were building it on the fly. So Stephen
<v Speaker 3>DeSUS is sitting right there and they're like, hey, we
<v Speaker 3>got to figure out a way to get these two
<v Speaker 3>guys together. They have to meet, and we have to
<v Speaker 3>use this accent so you know, John McClean doesn't know,
<v Speaker 3>And so Steve J. Susan gets busy writing this scene
<v Speaker 3>and then they think back when they're like, no, shoot,
<v Speaker 3>he sees him shoot to Kagi and Stephen DeSUS is like, well,
<v Speaker 3>wait a minute, have we shot that scene yet. They're
<v Speaker 3>like nope, it's set for tomorrow. And so they have
<v Speaker 3>to play with the angles to make sure that John
<v Speaker 3>McClain never sees Hans's face.
<v Speaker 2>Oh, so that's why he's under the table. That's it.
<v Speaker 3>He's under the table, and if you watch the scene,
<v Speaker 3>you don't see Hans from John's perspective.
<v Speaker 2>So they shoot that first scene between Bruce and Alan,
<v Speaker 2>John and Bill and John and Hans. Too many things
<v Speaker 2>going on there, and so they start showing dailies to
<v Speaker 2>people and they've got people from the studio there, and
<v Speaker 2>when they're watching the scene with Alan Rickman playing Bill Clay,
<v Speaker 2>there's a casting director there named Nancy Klopwright who loses
<v Speaker 2>her mind. She gets like super upset, and it's like,
<v Speaker 2>we can't have this guy as the bad guy. He's
<v Speaker 2>too weak. And Joel Silver's like, that's what it's supposed
<v Speaker 2>to be. In the scene he is playing Week. He's
<v Speaker 2>not actually week, He's playing Week. And she goes on
<v Speaker 2>this huge campaign to get Alan Rickman fired, which now,
<v Speaker 2>I mean, can you imagine that? I mean, if there
<v Speaker 2>is I love, love, love Bruce Willis, but if I
<v Speaker 2>got to pick one actor that made this movie, it
<v Speaker 2>was Alan Rickman. So that is kind of the beginnings
<v Speaker 2>of Diehard, which I don't know why we talked about
<v Speaker 2>it first, because it was the second movie. What had
<v Speaker 2>come out a couple of years before was a movie
<v Speaker 2>called Lethal Weapon, Yes freaking length a weapon, And this
<v Speaker 2>is the one that Shane Black wrote that we were
<v Speaker 2>talking about. So Shane Black has this script. Richard Donner
<v Speaker 2>hates action movies, but he reads this script and he
<v Speaker 2>enjoys the humor and he enjoys the fault in each
<v Speaker 2>of the main characters, like you've you've got the guy
<v Speaker 2>who's suicidal and a little bit crazy, and you've got
<v Speaker 2>guy who's too old for this shit, and so to
<v Speaker 2>him makes it a much more compelling story. And then,
<v Speaker 2>like I said, it's got the humor in it. And
<v Speaker 2>so Richard Donner's like, yes, this looks like a great movie.
<v Speaker 2>Now they had wanted other people for this. You ready
<v Speaker 2>for casting on lethal Weapon? Heck, yeah, let's do it. Okay,
<v Speaker 2>you jump on it, man.
<v Speaker 3>So initially when they were hiring for Lethal Weapon, they
<v Speaker 3>had no ethnicity specifically in mind. So the black family
<v Speaker 3>cop and the white suicidal cop that wasn't necessarily in
<v Speaker 3>the script.
<v Speaker 2>They just kind of came together through casting.
<v Speaker 3>Initially, they wanted Brian Denahey.
<v Speaker 2>To play Roger Marta.
<v Speaker 3>I could see that he had just done First Blood
<v Speaker 3>and thought, no, I've already done the cop thing for Riggs.
<v Speaker 3>They looked at Alec Baldwin, Jeff Bridges, Pierce Brosnan, Robert
<v Speaker 3>de Niro, Don Johnson, Michael Keaton. I could see him
<v Speaker 3>being the suicidal cop.
<v Speaker 2>Oh for sure, Yeah, you want.
<v Speaker 3>To get nuts, Liam Neeson, Sean In, Dennis Quaid, Kurt Russell,
<v Speaker 3>I mean, Tom Selleck, Charlie Sheen. These are all eighties
<v Speaker 3>action stars. But here's the one that I find the
<v Speaker 3>most interesting. Yes, Christopher Reeve was considered for the role
<v Speaker 3>of Martin.
<v Speaker 2>Riggs, Right right.
<v Speaker 3>I worked with Donner previously on Superman.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, seems like maybe a fit. But no, I don't know.
<v Speaker 2>Uh uh, I'm gonna go ahead and disagree on that.
<v Speaker 2>Bob Well not a fit for the character.
<v Speaker 3>A familiar face with Donna, right right?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, no, but yes, very interesting choice. But I would
<v Speaker 2>say probably the most interesting consideration is Bruce Willis. See
<v Speaker 2>that's crazy, right, I'll tell you a little secret what
<v Speaker 2>I'm not crazy? These movies are so connected it's unbelievable. Right,
<v Speaker 2>So Mel Gibson was considered for John McClain and Bruce
<v Speaker 2>Willis was considered for Martin.
<v Speaker 3>Do you know who Shane Black wanted to play Martin
<v Speaker 3>Riggs William Hurt.
<v Speaker 2>I can see that, and as we know, William Hurts
<v Speaker 2>a guy who's not afraid to say no.
<v Speaker 3>Right he turned down flashback to our Jurassic Park episode.
<v Speaker 2>He turned down the role of doctor Grant. Oh is
<v Speaker 2>it doctor Grant? Oh?
<v Speaker 3>Okay, but he is the most boring actor in the world.
<v Speaker 2>To me, I'm not, Oh my gosh, that's funny.
<v Speaker 3>Casting agent Marion Doherty wanted to cast Danny Glover after
<v Speaker 3>seeing him in the movie The Color Purple YEP. So
<v Speaker 3>she arranged to fly Mel Gibson from Sydney and Danny
<v Speaker 3>Glover flew from Chicago. They met in Los Angeles and
<v Speaker 3>the buddy cop movie of the eighties was made.
<v Speaker 2>It was instant chemistry, like they were immediately playing off
<v Speaker 2>each other, riffing off each other and just immediately had
<v Speaker 2>that perfect chemistry right meet you, new partner. And that,
<v Speaker 2>by the way, is one of the things that makes
<v Speaker 2>this movie so good is they've got this animosity throughout
<v Speaker 2>the movie and that's you know, we talked. We talked
<v Speaker 2>in our Raiders and Back to the Future episode about
<v Speaker 2>the hero's journey and how characters, you know, have to
<v Speaker 2>go through this cycle of change as they go through
<v Speaker 2>the movie. Well, these two guys both go through that
<v Speaker 2>cycle of change, but it's really the relationship that goes
<v Speaker 2>through the change, because at the beginning of the movie,
<v Speaker 2>it's like, you know what, I don't want to work
<v Speaker 2>with you. But and by the end of the movie,
<v Speaker 2>he's given him back the bullet and he's going to
<v Speaker 2>eat the crummy Christmas dinner with the family. So when
<v Speaker 2>we get to leth A Weapon two. By the way,
<v Speaker 2>they've become good friends at this point. So what are
<v Speaker 2>you going to do to have bickering. Well, you're gonna
<v Speaker 2>have Joe PESHI that's what you're gonna do.
<v Speaker 3>Whatever you need Leo gets, you get it.
<v Speaker 2>I use it all the time to break the ice
<v Speaker 2>when I meet people. You know.
<v Speaker 3>I asked my wife right before I came out here.
<v Speaker 3>I'm like, all right, I'm getting ready record leth the
<v Speaker 3>webon die Hard, what's your favorite part of Leith a Weapon?
<v Speaker 2>And she's like, here's what she said.
<v Speaker 3>She goes, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay.
<v Speaker 2>I thought you were going to say they get the
<v Speaker 2>drive through.
<v Speaker 3>Leave the weapon two takes h So this this franchise
<v Speaker 3>is so great.
<v Speaker 2>Listen, we're not here to talk about leth a Weapon Too,
<v Speaker 2>but since we're since you brought it up. The script
<v Speaker 2>for Leith the Weapon Too was originally written by Shane
<v Speaker 2>Black and they didn't use it. He got frustrated, walked
<v Speaker 2>off the movie, and they brought in Jeff Baum, who
<v Speaker 2>we talked about in The Lost Boys. Yeah right right,
<v Speaker 2>at which you mentioned, makes an appearance in Lethal Weapon
<v Speaker 2>because of Richard Donner. It shows up on the movie
<v Speaker 2>Marquee behind them as they were walking along having their
<v Speaker 2>hot dog. It says Lost Boys hit of the year,
<v Speaker 2>and so Jeff Boheme is the one that comes in
<v Speaker 2>and rewrites this script to give it more comedy and
<v Speaker 2>not as dark. Shane Black had written a very very
<v Speaker 2>dark Lethal Weapon two that ends with the death of
<v Speaker 2>Martin Riggs, and they said thanks, but no thanks. You know,
<v Speaker 2>here's your money. Thank you, have a nice day. But
<v Speaker 2>he maintains to this day that it is the best
<v Speaker 2>script he has ever written. Really.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, I would love to see that.
<v Speaker 2>I would. I'm sure there are lots and lots of
<v Speaker 2>people who would love to see it, but I don't
<v Speaker 2>think anybody ever will.
<v Speaker 3>Man Hey, just a little side note, mel Gibson turned
<v Speaker 3>down starring roles in the movie The Fly and the Untouchables.
<v Speaker 3>Can you imagine Mel Gibson as Elliott Ness and the Intouchables?
<v Speaker 2>Yes, kind of kind of cool, right, Yeah, he could
<v Speaker 2>have done that.
<v Speaker 3>I love all these what if scenarios, eighties what if Well.
<v Speaker 2>The interesting thing about mel Gibson is he had not
<v Speaker 2>done a movie in over a year at the time
<v Speaker 2>that they started filming lethal Weapon. He had had some
<v Speaker 2>crazy success with Mad Max and he had done I
<v Speaker 2>think like four movies in one year, which is a
<v Speaker 2>huge undertaking, and he just is like Russell Crowe, He's like,
<v Speaker 2>I got to go back to the farm. He went
<v Speaker 2>back to the farm on Australia and just put a
<v Speaker 2>do not disturb sign on the door. And so there
<v Speaker 2>is an original opening for Martin Riggs that nobody unless
<v Speaker 2>you've seen like the outtakes or the special features, you
<v Speaker 2>haven't seen it. Where he is in a bar drinking
<v Speaker 2>and he gets into this fight with these other guys
<v Speaker 2>and he's looking in the mirror before all this happens,
<v Speaker 2>and he looks like he was roaded hard and hung
<v Speaker 2>up wet. He looks bad, and he says, I look
<v Speaker 2>that way because I had gotten any sleep the night
<v Speaker 2>before we shot this scene, because it had been so
<v Speaker 2>long since I filmed a movie. I was scared to death. Yeah,
<v Speaker 2>that's pretty cool. I love that story.
<v Speaker 3>Hey, I want to drop a little eighties tidbit real quick.
<v Speaker 3>Very minor, I say, a minor character.
<v Speaker 2>The whole plot revolves.
<v Speaker 3>Around this character, but she's only in it for a
<v Speaker 3>few moments. Jackie Swanson plays Amanda Huntsecker.
<v Speaker 2>She is the prostitute to her death, jumps to her death.
<v Speaker 3>Jumps to her death at the very beginning of the movie, right,
<v Speaker 3>you know, topless drugs, prostitute.
<v Speaker 2>Your growing boy needs.
<v Speaker 3>So the whole plot of the movie revolves around her death.
<v Speaker 3>Jackie Swanson plays Kelly on Cheers.
<v Speaker 2>She plays Kelly Kelly. Kelly, Kelly, Kelly, Kelly, Kelly, Kelly
<v Speaker 2>k e l L. Why because she's Kelly Kelly Kelly.
<v Speaker 2>That's it. She's Kelly. She's Woody's wife on Cheers. She's
<v Speaker 2>the pretty little rich.
<v Speaker 3>Girl who's pristine and prude and sweet and playing absolutely
<v Speaker 3>the exact opposite of that character.
<v Speaker 2>I love it, okay, real quick.
<v Speaker 3>Gary Busey was hired as mister Joshua. Now, if you
<v Speaker 3>would kindly tell me everything you know, I promise you
<v Speaker 3>I'll kill you.
<v Speaker 2>He asked for the part, did he Yeah? So he
<v Speaker 2>hadn't done a lot like he was kind of on
<v Speaker 2>the downward slide. He had obviously had a lot of
<v Speaker 2>success with what's the Buddy Holly movie called. I think
<v Speaker 2>it's called The Buddy Holly Story. Okay, well that makes sense,
<v Speaker 2>all right. So anyway, he had quite a bit of success,
<v Speaker 2>but then he had not been getting good quality offers
<v Speaker 2>for a while and he saw a lot of promise
<v Speaker 2>in this script, and so he asked. He was like,
<v Speaker 2>can I be in this movie? I'm like, of course, sure.
<v Speaker 2>Because it's weird to think about both of these movies.
<v Speaker 2>They were not expected to be big hits. Neither one
<v Speaker 2>of them were expected to be big hits. It was
<v Speaker 2>just kind of a hey, see what you guys can
<v Speaker 2>do with this crazy bunch of stuff. And like you said,
<v Speaker 2>they were both of them throwing them together on the fly.
<v Speaker 2>And so that's why you get. I mean, Gary Busey
<v Speaker 2>you kind of think of as a major actor, but
<v Speaker 2>I mean, he does have the final fight scene, but
<v Speaker 2>he was number two in the movie, and so it
<v Speaker 2>was interesting to see him in that part instead of
<v Speaker 2>the head bad guy. He was just kind of the
<v Speaker 2>biggest heavy.
<v Speaker 3>His most memorable scene in the whole movie is when
<v Speaker 3>the general tells him to hold out his arm so
<v Speaker 3>he can hold a flame under his arm to show
<v Speaker 3>how tough he is and how devoted and loyal he is.
<v Speaker 2>So who's the other guy in that scene? You guys
<v Speaker 2>are gone man, you're like, out there, Edo Ross, Edo
<v Speaker 2>Ross is that guy, And I feel like I could
<v Speaker 2>never figure out why that part wasn't bigger because he was.
<v Speaker 2>He was, I mean, obviously a major part in that scene,
<v Speaker 2>but he was a pretty big actor at that time.
<v Speaker 2>He seemed to be like, it was this big, big
<v Speaker 2>scene that goes on. I expected to be in more
<v Speaker 2>in the movie. But the interesting thing is the role
<v Speaker 2>he had done just before he did this movie was
<v Speaker 2>in Moonlight. It had two episodes of Moonlighting as mister Navarone.
<v Speaker 2>So there you go. It's interesting again, intertwined these movies.
<v Speaker 3>Very intertwined, kind of. The next big movie that he
<v Speaker 3>did was Red Heat with Oor Schwarzenegger, who was in Predator,
<v Speaker 3>directed by Johnny Tiernan.
<v Speaker 2>I just cannot I still can't figure out why that
<v Speaker 2>was our one brief moment we got with this guy
<v Speaker 2>and then he wasn't in the rest of the movie.
<v Speaker 3>Other people that were considered for mister Joshua James Woods,
<v Speaker 3>Christopher Walkin, Tommy Lee Jones, Scott Glenn, John Saxon, I
<v Speaker 3>don't know.
<v Speaker 2>I like Gary Busey then the main bad guy. The
<v Speaker 2>only other movie that I can remember him in is
<v Speaker 2>liar liar. He's like the head partner at the law
<v Speaker 2>firm that gets roasted and he's his laugh and that
<v Speaker 2>is awesome. I think his comedy is great. I was impressed.
<v Speaker 3>Tracy Wolf plays Rhianne Murtau in Lethal Weapon. I have
<v Speaker 3>not seen her in anything else that I can think of. Yeah,
<v Speaker 3>every time I see her, I'm like, that's Roger Murta's daughter.
<v Speaker 3>She was twenty five when they filmed this. Playing a
<v Speaker 3>sixteen year.
<v Speaker 2>Old makes her obsession with Martin Riggs a little less creepy.
<v Speaker 3>Every time I see this, I'm so empathetic with the
<v Speaker 3>Murta character, Roger Murta, uh huh that.
<v Speaker 2>I'm like, yeah, she does need to go upstairs and
<v Speaker 2>put on small pers.
<v Speaker 3>She's not going out dressed like that. Mel Gibson's character,
<v Speaker 3>Martin Riggs is supposed to be thirty eight in Lethal Weapon.
<v Speaker 3>H Gibson was only thirty at the time he shot this.
<v Speaker 3>Roger Murta is supposed to be fifty. They make a
<v Speaker 3>big deal of this. He even blows out a birthday
<v Speaker 3>cake candles while he's sitting in the bath with his
<v Speaker 3>entire family around.
<v Speaker 2>Most uncomfortable scene in both of these movies.
<v Speaker 3>And he makes a big deal fifty years old. Fifty
<v Speaker 3>years old, I'm supposed to be retiring. Danny Glover was
<v Speaker 3>actually forty years old.
<v Speaker 2>When he shot this, Yeah, and was an incredible shape.
<v Speaker 2>Like they constantly talk about how good a shape he
<v Speaker 2>was in, and so you I mean, you know the
<v Speaker 2>scene where they're running down the road, right like Mel
<v Speaker 2>Gibson trucking along, sprinting down the road with a machine
<v Speaker 2>gun in his hand, and then Marta Danny Glover is
<v Speaker 2>kind of hobbling along down the road, dragging his foot
<v Speaker 2>out of breath, has to sit down, all this stuff.
<v Speaker 2>They shoot this scene and Richard Donner comes over to
<v Speaker 2>Danny Glover. He's like, okay, okay, Danny, can we try
<v Speaker 2>to do this one more time? And Danny's like, what
<v Speaker 2>do you mean to Mike? Okay? He gets up, runs
<v Speaker 2>around the block, comes back. He's like, let's do it.
<v Speaker 2>He's like, I think genius, Thank you.
<v Speaker 3>Okay, just a couple more things flip back to Diehard
<v Speaker 3>really quick. Bonnie Badillia was hired as Holly Gennaro. Bruce
<v Speaker 3>Willis really went to bat for her. He had seen
<v Speaker 3>her in a movie called Heart Like.
<v Speaker 2>A Wheel where she played a race car driver.
<v Speaker 3>I don't know if you remember that one, but he
<v Speaker 3>really just loved her performance in that movie, and he
<v Speaker 3>personally recommended her to play his estranged wife, Holly Gennaro.
<v Speaker 3>Other people that they were interested in were Linda Hamilton,
<v Speaker 3>Gena Davis, Debra Winger, Michelle Pfeiffer, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kelly McGillis,
<v Speaker 3>and Kerrie Fisher.
<v Speaker 2>My gosh, all of those just scream eighties movies. So
<v Speaker 2>it's interesting, you know the part of the wonderfulness of
<v Speaker 2>this movie is that it doesn't spoon feed you everything
<v Speaker 2>that's going on. Like, we know there's a problem with
<v Speaker 2>John and Holly, but we really don't know what it is.
<v Speaker 2>There isn't some big exposition as to what went wrong
<v Speaker 2>in their marriage, why they're as strange. We just have
<v Speaker 2>this kind of general idea that she's pursuing a career
<v Speaker 2>and he's not happy with that. But what we have
<v Speaker 2>is this fantastic, short little scene right before all of
<v Speaker 2>the action starts, where he's just finished walking around making
<v Speaker 2>fist with his toes in the carpet and they're doing
<v Speaker 2>their best to get along for about thirty seconds before
<v Speaker 2>he has to torpedo the ship and say, I can't
<v Speaker 2>remember what does he say? Do you remember what he says?
<v Speaker 3>She's like, she says, I missed you, and he's like,
<v Speaker 3>you miss me, but I guess you didn't miss my name,
<v Speaker 3>huh except when you're signing checks.
<v Speaker 2>So yeah, So that the classic dumb head husband thing
<v Speaker 2>to say, and he does it, and they've got this vicious, short,
<v Speaker 2>little exchange, but it informs so much as to their relationship,
<v Speaker 2>and you believe their love and animosity for each other
<v Speaker 2>in just that brief little scene and the way that
<v Speaker 2>they did that. Steven Desusa had Bruce Willis and Bonnie
<v Speaker 2>Badelia improv some stuff and they would improve long bits
<v Speaker 2>that go into the detail. But then once they actually
<v Speaker 2>shoot the scene, they don't give you all that detail.
<v Speaker 2>They just let it be the subtext behind what they're saying,
<v Speaker 2>and they did it fantastically.
<v Speaker 3>I love how you even get a little bit of
<v Speaker 3>that with our guyle in the limo on the way there,
<v Speaker 3>right yep? Why do you go with them? Man?
<v Speaker 1>What's up?
<v Speaker 2>So I'm a New York cup, I got a six
<v Speaker 2>month back log in New York's come. I'm still trying
<v Speaker 2>to put behind bars. I can't just pick up and
<v Speaker 2>go that easy. In other words, you thought she wasn't
<v Speaker 2>gonna make it out here.
<v Speaker 3>It's he'd come carawling up back to you, So why
<v Speaker 3>bother it back? Right?
<v Speaker 2>Like I said, you're very fast, I go. The actor
<v Speaker 2>Deverro White, who plays Argyle, is hilarious in this movie. Absolutely.
<v Speaker 3>A couple other people we really need to talk about
<v Speaker 3>casting Wise and Diehard. I want to talk a little
<v Speaker 3>bit about Reginald Villa Johnson.
<v Speaker 1>Ain't making thirty to dispatch a Yeah, that's a wild
<v Speaker 1>goose chase over here at Knocking Tomy pleasant everything he
<v Speaker 1>is okay over but nobody has.
<v Speaker 2>Let it Snoo.
<v Speaker 3>Who played a cop in per E Strangers, Yes, who
<v Speaker 3>then became the lead character in the TV show.
<v Speaker 2>Family Matters that.
<v Speaker 3>He does an awesome job of kind of being in
<v Speaker 3>the heart of the movie. Right, everybody loves Sergeant al Pau.
<v Speaker 2>I had this thought, you just you tell me what
<v Speaker 2>you think about this. So obviously leitha Weapon is a
<v Speaker 2>buddy cop movie, right right? Is Diehard a buddy cop movie? Yeah?
<v Speaker 2>Absolutely it is. With that I mean out, I mean,
<v Speaker 2>he's really like Sergeant Awl. Powell is the mentor. He's
<v Speaker 2>the guy who leads John McClain through all of this stuff.
<v Speaker 2>He leads him through the tough times. It's their exchange
<v Speaker 2>that leads to the character transition. I don't know. Maybe
<v Speaker 2>this is a buddy coop movie. I think it is.
<v Speaker 3>I think it's a buddy cop movie where the cups
<v Speaker 3>are separated and it belonged to be back together.
<v Speaker 2>You know. Yeah. I love the relationship that they build
<v Speaker 2>and it's still again, like I said before, fascinating to
<v Speaker 2>me that they probably shot all of Reginald val Johnson's
<v Speaker 2>scenes after Bruce had gone back to the moon lighting
<v Speaker 2>and wasn't even there anymore.
<v Speaker 3>I do know for a fact on my research they
<v Speaker 3>Bruce Willis and Reginald vel Johnson did not meet until
<v Speaker 3>the last scene of the movie. They never met until
<v Speaker 3>the famous It's Knowing Bear Bond scene.
<v Speaker 2>Let's talk about William Atherton for just a second.
<v Speaker 3>This guy played the world's greatest eighties butthole in every
<v Speaker 3>movie they give us.
<v Speaker 2>A break thorn burden at Harvey right, he like tops
<v Speaker 2>himself in every movie. Well him or Paul Gleeson. It's
<v Speaker 2>a real toss up right, But somehow the brilliance of
<v Speaker 2>Joel Silver or John mcturnon or whoever got both of
<v Speaker 2>these guys in the same movie. How freaking awesome is that?
<v Speaker 2>I'm telling you so.
<v Speaker 3>William Atherton plays the professor in Real Genius, who is
<v Speaker 3>out to flunt Chris Knight Val Kilmer's character.
<v Speaker 2>Yep. And then he's.
<v Speaker 3>Also the health inspector, or the safety inspector in Ghostbusters,
<v Speaker 3>the one who does not know the magic word.
<v Speaker 2>It's true, this man has to sick.
<v Speaker 3>And then, as you said, Paul Gleeson plays the principle
<v Speaker 3>in the Breakfast Club.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah right, they'll mess with the bull you get the horns.
<v Speaker 2>Also the corrupt inspector in Trading Places.
<v Speaker 3>Oh, I totally forgot about that. And then one guy
<v Speaker 3>I really wanted to bring up before we go any further,
<v Speaker 3>Alexander Gudanov. We could do a whole podcast and maybe
<v Speaker 3>we'll do a mini one off on him. He was
<v Speaker 3>a Russian ballet dancer yep who effected yep. They hired
<v Speaker 3>him because they knew he could be athletic enough to
<v Speaker 3>do fight scenes.
<v Speaker 2>Right, and the fight scene between him and Bruce Willis
<v Speaker 2>was not like a choreographed thing. It was very much
<v Speaker 2>an improvisational we're just fighting away, but they did a
<v Speaker 2>fantastic job with it.
<v Speaker 3>I saw an interview with Joel Silver and when he
<v Speaker 3>was discussing Alexander Goudnoff, he said, great guy, drunk all
<v Speaker 3>the time.
<v Speaker 2>Yes, which is hilarious until you learn that he died
<v Speaker 2>in the mid nineties of cirrhosis of the liver, which
<v Speaker 2>is tragic.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, just a couple more on pre production d before
<v Speaker 3>we wrap it up. I thought it was interesting, now
<v Speaker 3>this is this is pre production, it's also a production,
<v Speaker 3>but the fictional Knacotomy Plaza is actually the headquarters of
<v Speaker 3>twentieth Century Fox. Yes, this building was incomplete, but there
<v Speaker 3>were people working.
<v Speaker 2>In this building.
<v Speaker 3>Yes, at the time they were filming this movie. The
<v Speaker 3>company actually had to charge itself rent to use this building.
<v Speaker 2>Had to or or used it as an excuse to
<v Speaker 2>spend money that didn't that was now tax deductible. I
<v Speaker 2>would say, yeah, there was a there was a lawyer
<v Speaker 2>downstairs who didn't represent anybody. He was a pretty high
<v Speaker 2>powered lawyer in la but he did not represent anyone
<v Speaker 2>in the picture, and so he was none too happy
<v Speaker 2>about the full sound effect blasts of all of them,
<v Speaker 2>the machine guns going on.
<v Speaker 3>Imagine trying to do work and you know you've got
<v Speaker 3>machine guns and people jumping off buildings with fire hoses
<v Speaker 3>and helicopters and miss launchers.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, here's something interesting. Nakatomi Plaza. Nakatomi is the
<v Speaker 2>name of a Japanese battleship. That's the way they got
<v Speaker 2>this name. They came across this list of and I
<v Speaker 2>think they're named after like Japanese clans of the past
<v Speaker 2>and stuff the battleships are. And so they're going through
<v Speaker 2>the list of Japanese battleships and they see Nakatomi and
<v Speaker 2>they're like, yeah, that sounds cool, let's go with that.
<v Speaker 2>So Nakatomi just look cool, and that's why they decided
<v Speaker 2>to go with it. But then the logo. I never
<v Speaker 2>realized this before, but Joel Silver was talking about how
<v Speaker 2>they came across the logo. He found it in a
<v Speaker 2>catalog that had Samurai helmets on it. If you go
<v Speaker 2>back and look at the logo, it's these it's these
<v Speaker 2>bars that kind of come up and two little circles
<v Speaker 2>in it above the name Nakatomi, and it looks like
<v Speaker 2>a samurai helmet. I never noticed until he said that,
<v Speaker 2>But I was like, holy cow, Nakatomi the samurai. Pretty
<v Speaker 2>freaking awesome. And this movie did fantastic in Japan. You know,
<v Speaker 2>if there's any concerns about, you know, the weird kind
<v Speaker 2>of cultural things that go on with the Japanese comments,
<v Speaker 2>this movie killed one awards in Japan. That's awesome.
<v Speaker 3>So a couple of things on pre production, We've talked
<v Speaker 3>a little bit about how they kind of wrote this
<v Speaker 3>on the go. Bruce Willis and John McTiernan talked publicly
<v Speaker 3>about how they didn't really know who John McLean was
<v Speaker 3>until about halfway through shooting. WHI then just the flying,
<v Speaker 3>the ointment, the monkey in the wrench, the pain in
<v Speaker 3>ish right, But.
<v Speaker 2>I thought this was interesting.
<v Speaker 3>Jib Stewart, who wrote the original screenplay for Diehard, was
<v Speaker 3>having difficulty writing the screenplay, and while he was driving
<v Speaker 3>at night in Los Angeles after a fight with his wife,
<v Speaker 3>he was driving behind a truck carrying refrigerators.
<v Speaker 2>Do you hear the story? No, this is good, Go ahead, Okay,
<v Speaker 2>So he was.
<v Speaker 3>Driving behind a truck carrying refrigerators and one of the
<v Speaker 3>refrigerator boxes fell out of the truck. He thought he
<v Speaker 3>was going to die. He swerved and thought, I'm this
<v Speaker 3>is it, this is it for me. And it turns
<v Speaker 3>out the box was empty. It didn't have a fridge
<v Speaker 3>in it. It is just the box. And so he
<v Speaker 3>plowed through it with his car folded over the top.
<v Speaker 3>And he realized that if he had died, he would
<v Speaker 3>not have been able to apologize to his wife. And
<v Speaker 3>that made it into the movie, the whole thing about
<v Speaker 3>how she's heard me say I love her a thousand times,
<v Speaker 3>but she's never heard me say I'm sorry. That's because
<v Speaker 3>Jeb Stewart plowed through a refrigerator box.
<v Speaker 2>That's awesome. That is a great story. Wow, that's fantastic.
<v Speaker 3>The original script called for terrorists to hijack the building.
<v Speaker 3>John McTiernan he didn't like the idea of terrorists season
<v Speaker 3>control of Knokotoni Tower. Nobody likes terrorists, right, right, But
<v Speaker 3>if their robbers, a bank heist is way more fun
<v Speaker 3>to common thief.
<v Speaker 2>I'm an exceptional thief. Since I'm moving up to kidnapping,
<v Speaker 2>you should chose some more respect, You should be more polite. Okay,
<v Speaker 2>So that does it for pre production? Are you done?
<v Speaker 2>I haven't even got started yet.
<v Speaker 3>Forget that, I forget that.
<v Speaker 2>You have to be done, because that's the end of
<v Speaker 2>this episode. We'll start back up on the rest of
<v Speaker 2>it for our next episode. Thank you everybody so much
<v Speaker 2>for being here. Jason, you know what one shepherd said
<v Speaker 2>to the other shepherd, Get the block out of here.
<v Speaker 2>We'll see you all next time.